


‘meant to be’ never fits to a tee, but we’re okay

by alltheglitters



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-22
Updated: 2011-04-22
Packaged: 2017-10-18 12:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alltheglitters/pseuds/alltheglitters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She sends a postcard of a kangaroo accompanied by a speech bubble, an expletive and a rude hand gesture - so much for a goodbye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	‘meant to be’ never fits to a tee, but we’re okay

**Author's Note:**

> a few notes: thank you to withdrawnred @ lj for the support, betaing and generally making the fic suck less. dedicated to my life partner, fairchilds @ lj.

Saying goodbye is an art.

He paints well with his brush; nothing but flowing strokes on the clean, crisp sheet of paper. If you squint, the lines resemble a river.

For a certain architect, who tells herself she can usually cross-hatch better, it is a intricate labyrinth to tread.

 

 

At her graduation, when the zephyr is cool on her skin and she holds the mortarboard in her hand, he and Eames are there. While the older man tells her to take the elevator up to the Eiffel Tower (why is that the only place people think of when visiting France?), drink up and blow off steam, Arthur hands her a rose.

"Congratulations," he says evenly.

The hug with arms open, but not quite, the awkward handshake and the fleeting glance; these details blur afterwards.

 

 

She still feels his kiss a left to her cheek, after he slips away in silence as she dozes off on the park bench. He doesn't leave his jacket.

There is no manic ardor, no fervent fantasy, just _now where did he go_?

 

 

You wait this long. (And yes, it has been long.)

Where the hell is she?

 

 

He knows how to contact her, how to track her down. He even knows the class she’s taking (course code: VC001, duration: full-time, 1 year, location: Rozelle campus) and the best time to see her (at eight am. She is always wide awake then), and yet, he doesn’t call her.

Not yet.

That is his job: keeping a tab on things. Even with Cobb taking a two-month hiatus from their “work” and Eames gambling in Macau, Arthur maintains the same level of professionalism, _pragmatism_. At age ten, when the school bully asked for the low-down on the new boy, he told him the whereabouts of poor Daniel Parks. Now at twenty years of age, his sneakers no longer squeak as he walks –

He chucked them into the trash can when he blew out the seventeenth candle.

 

 

“Who’s Ariadne?” (a curious glance here, a _tut_ , pause) “Arthur, that’s a name I haven’t heard of yet.”

His grandmother’s voice rings like breaking dishes on the kitchen floor. This holiday season, he hears children laugh, watching _The Simpsons_ special on Fox. He barely hears though, he prefers to listen to Charlie and his wife as they discuss whether she should quit teaching in order to take care for their one-year-old child (in hushed, hushed tones).

Uncle Ben raises a quirked brow. “There’s a girl in the picture?”

She sends a postcard to his house. There’s a kangaroo on the front accompanied by a speech bubble, an expletive and a rude hand gesture. He imagines what Grammy was thinking when she saw this in their post box. On the back, she scrawled her name in her habitually careless handwriting and not much else.

“There’s no girl.”

 

 

He writes a check for Charlie.

 

 

She stares at the blank canvas. Notes, diagrams, palettes lie on the working space. She wanted to create a mountain made of thin threads, finished with orange, yellow and green paint and chips of silver, but it’s just – this is – and the – Ariadne might as well squish the next ant that crawls through the studio, stick it onto the page and call it a day.

“Bored already?”

She doesn’t turn, doesn’t need to.

His voice is controlled, calm and more baritone than any of her projections of him.

At this rate, she probably won’t obtain her master’s degree this year. “No.”

“Why Australia?”

“Why not?”

“Fair enough.” He sits beside her.

There’s a twist in her stomach. His scent reminds her of the spices she spotted at the Parisian market during summertime, when she told Mom that she really _didn’t_ forget her New Year’s resolution and that she’d learn to cook crème brûlée soon.

Shift, shift. She reaches into her pocket, touches the weight of the chess piece and laughs.

 

“You’re an ass,” she tells him, pulling off the wires from the machine. Even if it’s quick and psychological, getting shot in the head, she still isn’t used to it.

The library. Her head on the desk, pencil in her hair. They’re at the library.

He rests his head on her shoulder.

“Paris is fascinating, bigger… Reminds of the places we used to go. Sydney is refreshing and new, I like it here. You say that it’s boring, but I love it and you know I won’t settle for less.”

She shows him her ten drawings, some beautiful ones that seem to defy gravity – he couldn’t think of a less clichéd phrase to use – and the boundaries of his mind. She points here and there and she speaks so quickly that he doesn’t catch on… He just listens. Her laughter and quick words sound like the wind chimes Grammy sent him for his birthday; the package is unopened.

She smells like grass and there’s dirt on her face; she must have studied in the courtyard.

 

 

Something courses through his veins, mounting higher and higher like stars at night. He feels the linen budge as she skips to the café. For their first date last night, she made pasta and he can still feel the mozzarella on his chin. She ignored his initial protests when he said that she was _doing something wrong_. It is as if she changed her mind at the last minute to oven-bake a pizza, because she didn’t have enough dough. Instead, she made pasta.

Maybe, he should cook the next time.

No kisses though. He didn’t want to ruin _that_ memory.

He slid his arm around her waist, pulled her into his embrace and they fell asleep together, her breath warm on his neck.

He stays still. If he moves a little, he’ll fall off the bed.

Landing on the cheap, polyester carpet, which, strangely enough, reminds him of the time Nash screwed up Saito’s rug.

 

 

The courtship continues in its lovely, albeit strange, way.

 

 

He unpacks his rectangular suitcase. There are twenty passports in the pocket, and underneath each layer of clothing, he carefully inserted documents, organized alphabetically. Each of his slacks, vests and Oxford shirts are pressed.

“How long are you staying?” she asks over lunch, handing him a cup of coffee (two lumps of brown sugar with cream, stirred twice clockwise). Her curls bounce as she pulls the calendar off the bulletin board.

“I’ll – ”

“Wait a minute.”

She stares at his garments. Incredulous, she says, “You color-coordinate your shirts?”

White, white, white, gray, gray, black, blue, and another blue one he never wears.

His fingers lace through hers – “Shut up.” – and his nose grazes her forehead.

 

 

He leaves a toothbrush on the sink.

She puts it back into his luggage for him.

 

 

Her classmates see them together, their hands brushing as they walk through the campus. She shows him the building she likes the best, the one that should be demolished as soon as humanly possible and the one with clear windows, where you have to walk up to the fifth floor by foot to get to the Japanese place with the really good salmon. She has a couple of friends, most of them studying at the same faculty. She tells them that there isn’t much to say.

Then he must be married. Why else is he so quiet and doesn’t he seem old – older, I mean, doesn’t he?

“Don’t you work?”

“We have an upcoming job,” he responds easily. “However, we’re short of an architect… The client demands the best.”

Beneath the table, Arthur kicks her foot.

She pinches herself, fingers fumbling for her totem. This can’t be real nor a false image either, because her California roll tastes like crap today.

She grins, tying a rubber band around Arthur’s chopsticks. “I have to graduate first. I promised Mom I would.”

 

 

“It’ll be a one-time deal.”

 

 

He leaves a note.

There is an emergency. He must help Eames this weekend.

She folds the card, hangs it on the fridge with a koala magnet.

 

 

And honestly, he is terrible at this _dating_ thing. He’s just not getting it…

Maybe it’s different in Australia.

It doesn’t help when Eames sends him a photograph of a young man, his arms around a familiar brunette. From the gritty, noisy detail, he can make out the huge grin on the guy’s face. He looks as if he’ll add the word “mate” at the end of every sentence.

Nor does it help that Arthur’s halfway around the world.

 

 

She doesn’t think about him a lot. Only sometimes. She remembers him when she isn’t rushing out the door, has a second to see the blue shirt he left in her closet, deliberately, because he never forgets anything.

Things occupy her.

Not nearly as much as dreams did, but things do nevertheless.

Her friends.

A certain boy in class.

Her books, research, drawings. Pursuing Studio Art is further away from a flight of the imagination, larger a step than Architecture ever was, but that’s it. –

She is too young to be jaded by reality.

 

 

Her report at the end of the semester doesn’t provide her a reason to slack. If anything, she wants to do better, go further.

She raises her hand at guest lectures, writes hundreds of notes during gallery visits, but she still doesn’t see this coming:

She has enough credits to finish up in August.

Or at least, the computer reads this as her tutor says that she can leave earlier, provided that she’ll be back for the ceremony in November.

Today is the twenty-eighth of July.

 

 

It’s urgent, this dream within a dream within another.

Arthur shoves a 9mm in her hand.

He pushes her against the pillar, shielding her from an assassin’s circle of vision.

It has been two hours since the mission began.

“Remind me why I’m here.”

“Because you’re ambitious, bored and – ” (“I tampered with your academic records.” Of course, he doesn’t say that; she knows.) _Bang, bang, bang!_ He loads another cartridge. “You’re good. Go for it, Ariadne.”

Her name sounds rather nice coming from him.

She shoots.

She scores.

 

 

When she wakes up, once more, and again, she snatches his gun.

Aiming at that beer can Eames must have left on the floor, she misses.

 

 

Her old apartment is still vacant a year later.

She accepts the offer at Dominique Perrault, an architectural firm in Paris. Day in and day out, the job starts to look like the paperwork her mother brought home from the IRS: jumbled with numerals and mundane data.

When she calls Arthur, he isn’t surprised.

 

 

“We’ve missed you,” he says as she opens the door.

He doesn’t ask before stepping in.

“We?” She sticks out her tongue. “C’mon, Arthur. I’m sure _you_ missed me a lot.”

He gives her a bottle of wine. She doesn’t need to read the label to know that he didn’t buy it at the convenience store for five Euros.

“I – ”

 

 

His depiction of an apple looks _off_ and she can’t pinpoint why exactly.

She erases the shadow Arthur draws, pointing at the window as the sunlight seeps in. “See that. It goes from this side – ” She taps the stem. “To this.”

He grips the charcoal when she tells him to redo it.

 

 

It is all wrong, she realizes after their fifth date, when their lips meet.

They stumble into her apartment, chuckling, woozy.

It strikes her that his lips are chapped. Every other aspect of his life seems methodical, arranged and faultless.

He doesn’t taste like mint, like he did the first time, but (she checks first) yes, this is reality and in reality, things don’t work out like that –

He melts against her, pulling at her shirt. He tastes like curry, wine and aftershave.

\- And that’s fine.

With his long fingers gripping her hips, his mouth on hers, the bruising kiss still feels like fire anyway.

 

 

They visit the places she yearns to see: the existing ones and those Ariadne built. Cobb even takes them to Santorini – she’s talked about it all year.

She splashes Arthur with water when they reach the Aegean Sea.

 

 

His cell rings. Waking up, Ariadne recognizes the tone. It is the standard Nokia one that everyone uses. His eyes are closed, but he hears her mumbling, putting down the phone, throwing on a shirt, some pants. Knock, knock. Who the hell is there? At – his clock reads – three forty-five in the morning?

“Hello, love,” Eames bellows from her living room. “You left the key at the door.”

Ariadne sighs. “Why’d you make me get up then?”

“Figured it was more fun.”

 

 

When Cobb lets them off on Tuesday, he finally makes the time to draw a perfect apple. It only took eleven sheets of paper. He puts it on the counter along with a fat paycheck for their last job.

She comes home at nine (this is her last week at the firm); he’s in the kitchen of all places.

Pan on the stove, two eggs, glasses of milk.

“You’re cooking breakfast?” She holds his sketch, grinning.

His white sleeves are rolled up, his hair gelled back. He appears to be impeccably tidy.

“It’s nighttime, Arthur,” she points out, passing him the salt.

“It’s nine-oh-five. You said you didn’t want to repeat the whole American tradition of dinner and a movie.”

“People don’t have breakfast at this hour in France either.”

He serves her omelets. “Look outside, Ariadne. The sun sets in an hour.”

Halfway through their pseudo breakfast, she sips her OJ. “You know, I wouldn’t like you if you were boring.”

I’d like you, even if you are boring.

 

 

She lied.

Well, not really.

She likes it. When it comes to buildings and the colors of the Grecian sky, she likes to be surprised, but in time, she comes to appreciate stability.

In her world, permanence is refreshing.

All of this has been gradual, of course. She almost didn’t realize it, because it happened so slowly. The first time he stayed the night, he left at six to return to his hotel. Five months later, she woke up listening to him snore before going back to sleep. A while after that, he told her that his cable was out, even if InterContinental would never let that happen, and he needed to watch CNN here.

This got to a point where she now knows his morning routine and his idiosyncrasies, the trivial things the person in question wouldn’t notice about themselves. After the third _brrrrriiiiiiiiiiing_ , he would wake up, stretch his long limbs, plant a kiss on her cheek. He puts on his contacts, which are on the small table. His side of the bed. (It has taken three years for her to learn that he actually doesn’t have 20/20 vision.) He moves to the couch outside. Settles in with a cushion to support his back, turns on his Dell and waits for Microsoft to load. After the second hour, he sends a backup copy to his email address and then continues to research.

It is in the afternoon when she goes to wash her hair that she sees his gray toothbrush next to the basin.

She puts it into her only cup, along with her bright orange one, where it belongs.

Fin. 


End file.
